War Photography

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Compare the Ways in Which Carol Ann Duffy (War Photographer) and Kate Daniels (War Photograph) Consider the Realities of War and Its Impact on Different Individuals

In this essay I will compare the ways in which Carol Ann Duffy and Kate Daniels compare the realities of war and its impact on individuals. War Photographer is written by Carol Ann Duffy. It focuses on the photographer, rather than his work. The photographer’s emotions, his job and the affect it has on him will be the main elements of Duffy’s poem. War Photograph is produced by Kate Daniels. Her poem is focussed on a specific photo. This photograph shows a young girl in Vietnam running from a demolished city that has been coated with flames, death and gun fire. Daniels describes everything in the photograph in her own perspective, a perspective that the public would never think of seeing.

Duffy’s poem focuses on one individual, the photographer. Duffy realises what not many people do. Most people believe that photographers are heartless people that continuously take photographs of suffering victims of the war. But she knows that they are affected by what they see through their lenses. However, she speaks of a photographer who she believes that he is being haunted by his own work and this is an explanation of “a half formed ghost”. And if I was in the photographer’s position, I would be haunted as much as him. As he is sat in his red lit dark room alone, the visual memory of the wounded civilians haunt him.

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 From someone’s point of view, a war maybe just another pay rise to a photographer. But from Duffy’s way of thinking, the photographer is going through emotional agony trying to forget what his lens has captured. He has to deal with the guilt of not being able to offer help to those who he has desperately harassed and published their miserable lives in a cheap paper.

The photographer must have seen too many corpses, injuries and gallons of blood. This maybe an explanation to “all flesh is grass” as if every blade of grass was replaced by blood, due to ...

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